If You Let Them Build It, They Will Stay! An Empirical Study of Add-on Content and User Engagement

This study aims to uncover the effects of two types of add-on content –namely, user generated and developer generated content– on user engagement with software. Utilizing a novel dataset from a major online game distribution platform covering 7323 products between January 2015 and February 2016, the findings reveal that both types of add-on content increases the engagement with software. However, we observe substitutive patterns between different types of add-on content. Our results suggest integrating social features to the base product reduces these substitution effects. The results of this study contribute to the literatures on user engagement and add-on content by uncovering hitherto overlooked substitutive relations between user generated and developer generated addon content. Keywords-Online Games; Add-on Content; User Engagement; Digital Economy; Having new heroes to the game is kind of vital to the longterm involvement and investment that the players have. You want to feel like it’s a living, breathing game that always has something new and exciting that’s being added to it. Aaron Keller, Asst. Game Director, Blizzard Interactive [1]